The Listening Post Beyond Your Lines
by starinhercorner
Summary: No matter what the arm's length distance and teetering silence would say about the state of things between them, they're no strangers, and when it comes to each other, they have nothing to lose. Set in (after?) s2, ep. 11.


The door doesn't shut on its own. She doesn't let it. The air streaming in softly and naturally from the hallway stops abruptly, ending in one last puff against the back of his neck.

"I don't remember telling Dick where I was staying." Stepping back as if from fire, M'gann builds an immediate distance between herself and Conner. Its small size makes it no less harrowing, and Conner half-dreads having to bridge it with even his eyes. There's a knot in his throat, in the heavy rope he feels running through him like veins, tied to lead weights in his feet that keep him from advancing more than inches from the welcome mat. He loosens its hold just enough to speak.

"You didn't." Conner's eyes stray to the cardboard box at his right, and he thinks through the thunder that it brings back to his ears, through the storm of debris and the smack of his skull against water. He thinks through the rhythm of her footfalls against carpet, the sight of her own arms around herself in the place of Gar's, La'gaan's, or his own as she paced behind her designated sofa in the low light of the Hall's lounge. He thinks through his own profound lack of sleep. "Didn't have to."

There are echoes of that night in the arms crossed now against her chest. "So… what? Lucky guess?" M'gann's voice treads thin ice, both cautious and cold. "Or there's just nowhere else I could go?"

"Yeah," he admits to the floor, eyes staying off of her. "That."

"…Ah." Her eyes affix themselves to the same knot in the wood floor that his have found, unknown to either of them. Her fingers tug at the sleeve that slowly starts to tighten of its own volition and make her pulse, in all its noise and speed, felt in the very bone of her arm. He can't ignore it, not the sound or how her weight shifts back and forth between her feet. After a bout of long, slow half-silence, she beats him to the first next step. He watches her hook one arm around the back of a chair and bring it to the room's central table as if her mind couldn't perform the task with a fraction of the effort. There are words he came here with, words that carried him from the warehouse in Blüdhaven to a Chicago junkyard and propelled his feet down sidewalk and up stairs—but they're stuck in his mouth, as stuck as he is as he watches her sit. _What could make you run away from us_ itches on his tongue, almost burns, but he swallows it down to make room for something less harsh. It's a feat for him, but it's in vain, because once again she's ahead of him, already sighing. "There's a _reason_ I came here, Conner."

He thinks she might be scolding him. She props up one arm on the table—leaves from the plant beside her scratching against her sleeve—and presses the side of her head into her fingertips. The gesture reminds him how easily she could read his mind, and he waits, just in case, for the weight of that possibility to drop into the pit of his stomach. The worry doesn't come. For now, for lack of a better word, he'll count that as "trust."

"I'm guessing it's got nothin' to do with unwashed socks." From another mouth on another day it could have been a joke. But it fumbles out of Conner flat and humorless, and the absence of laughter is filled by fabric shifting and more leaves flicking as M'gann lays her arms down on the tabletop before her. Her fingers light scrape at each other at the tips, nails against skin.

"I wanted to be alone."

"Well _that_ doesn't sound like you." The spectacle that has been hers and La'gaan's relationship the past… almost four months now, he counts with ease, plays behind his eyes, and he does a poor job of masking it. M'gann winces, and addresses her curling fingers as she speaks.

"Please. I'm trying to just leave you alone. Let me?" Somehow she finds his eyes the moment she looks up, and without even trying they return the blow he dealt. He swallows hard, deepening his frown at the corners. His legs are braced for landmines and broken boards as he finally makes them move, and her eyes dart to the window in retreat, or even escape. He stops at the rug and shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. A light goes out in a neighboring building as M'gann's ears pick up the new closeness in his voice.

"I'm not just here for me. Gar's back from the debrief with Canary."

Something releases in the back of her head, air or blood or electricity, and rushes to her eyes, stopping at walls just behind them. Conner thinks he can see traces of blue-violet peek out under her eyes, slip out of the control she has over her appearance.

"How is he?"

"Fine. And wondering why his sister wasn't there to meet him when he got back." He dulls the blade in his voice as much as he can, but he knows it cuts her when her fingers are back at her temples, ducking under bangs to hide the circles being rubbed into her skin. "To be honest, I'm wondering the same."

Carefully, M'gann drags her free arm closer to her body, and it curls at the wrist as the pad of her thumb runs across her nails. "…Tell him I'm sorry, please."

"Why can't you?"

"I… can't… talk about it, right now." She forces evenness, breaks her voice into smaller parts to push out one by one, but the result is neither clean nor composed. Hair grazes the edges of her eyes and obscures the expression in them as she turns her face away.

"M'gann, what is it." He doesn't pose a question, for in his mind the answer is not optional, but he holds back aggression like a breath. "Look, I know something was up back at the Hall, and I don't mean _Big Ugly_ and I _don't_ mean the Reach. I mean with you."

He hears her whisper "Of course"—he's sure of it. It's a thump in his ears, like a single heartbeat.

"You tell me." Her tone holds a challenge, no matter how small or meek that challenge may be. "I thought you already knew. My 'Martian mind' wasn't in it, isn't that what y…"

The groan of wood against wood as Conner drags a chair over to the table sends her voice off as quietly as it came.

"M'gann… no. None of this." With his side leaning into the chair's back, he sits across from her at all awkward angles and with his hands at the ready. But in the place of fists, his open palms are calling a truce. "No defending ourselves, no attacking. I didn't come here for a fight." All the same, her back starts to hunch like something cornered, something feral. Her teeth show between her lips in a tiny slip out from which a word makes it by half a syllable before he's shed one glove, then the other—but there's nothing sacred in his bare hands that should call for silence, not to anyone but her. He lays the gloves on their backs before her, and her eyes soften at the edges as she watches his hands test nakedness, his fingers rolling together tightly then relaxing. When she notices his eyes are on her, gauging her reaction, she realizes it's for emphasis. "I mean it."

"W-well, what then? Why come see _me_?" She tries to play off the shaking in her breath as a scoff, but the inflection gives her away.

"Like I said, to talk."

"Isn't that what phones are for?" It's not a disregard of his request for peace. It's a jab at herself. The phone in her pocket presses into her hip, and the light of La'gaan's smile lingers in her mind like the remnants of a flash, spots around it floating in the dark. The taste of another mistake, acidic and dry, already starts to line her insides.

"Would you have answered?" he bluffs. The thought hadn't crossed his mind. He could have spared himself the pointed look from La'gaan on his way out, but a little vitriol sent his way was nothing, was worth it to get to her.

Her sudden silence on the matter is the very answer she chooses to withhold.

"What is there to talk about? You've made your feelings pretty c-clear. I told you, I just w-w… _want_… to be alone right now." Her voice grinds against concrete, hits it hard enough to leave scrapes, and drags itself along wounded and stinging. "I'll come back, okay? Tell G-Gar I'll be back soon, tomorrow, l-later, tonight, a-a-an hour, j-just—I just…" She knows when she's failing—lately it's too frequent to miss—but she doesn't let him interrupt. "…Need… to be alone right now." Her arms wrap tightly around themselves and her torso, and she shivers just once.

Once is enough. A chill rumbles at the base of his spine before shooting up his back. He rubs his neck and flattens hairs that are standing on end. Infrared tells him that the room is nothing abnormal; there's been no blip in the thermostat. It's not nearly as cold as her body language suggests, and he's watched her break herself out of a column of ice. The memory burns a little in his chest, dries out his lips.

He blinks the colors away. "…I don't think so. I'm staying all night if I have to. We're _going_ to talk. And then we can go back to whatever we…" Wood creaks underneath him as he straightens in his seat. "I'll start."

He doesn't mean to wait for her confirmation, but in the time it takes for him to choose his first words, she closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, relaxes her shoulders, and tells him, "Go." It's a dare and a surrender all at once. She tucks her hands neatly under the table, and unaware of the grip she has on her own wrists, he nods.

"A-at the Hall," her stuttering proves to be contagious, but he only curses his, "we needed you. Mal was up there with just a costume and basic training taking on a super-powerful alien I couldn't lay a scratch on. The rest of our friends were down. We'd just lost one base, and now another was being attacked. We, uh, lost that one, too—but—_the point is_, you could have ended that fight way sooner than it ended. _Without _Zatanna or Mal's help. I didn't get why you weren't giving your all. Still don't." He holds up a hand before her mouth can even twitch. "But I think I kinda get now why you haven't been holding back."

The rattling of her heart in his ears skips a beat before doubling in speed. "Wh-what?"

"When I'm… on the offensive… 'specially 'gainst an enemy like that… I don't think about whether or not I'm hitting too hard. It's more like the opposite… I worry about whether or not I'm hitting _hard enough_, if I'm _doing _enough when I'm never going to be as strong as I was made to be. That's probably how I ever thought those _Shields_ were a good idea, comin' from _Luthor_… It felt like I needed all that power just to be… _right_, y'know? To _work right._" His bare hands press flat against the tabletop, the pads of loosely spread fingers almost sticking to the wood. He eyes the veins and creases that have shown in his skin since before he had a name, parts of him that will never change, not until the earth takes in a body it can barely claim as its own. "Superman… Superman's taught me a lot about using the powers I've got, about giving the bad guys just what they deserve, a-and the good guys, and that balance… but somehow he just knows. Me… I'm still working on it. I'm still trying to _get it_."

At less of a loss than she could wish for, dread creeping up inside her bone by bone, rib by rib, of some word coming that will break her, M'gann simply nods. She wets her lips and steadies her heart with the force of will that it would take to shift it into something else.

Conner leans forward, putting weight on his elbows and looping on arm loosely over the other. "But you're powerful, M'gann. You can do a lot more damage…" His toes clench in his boots. "Than me." He makes a mental note to reserve heart-to-hearts with his ex-solely for emergencies in the future, if this isn't one. "I _know_ I've been telling you that what you're doing with your powers is wrong, but… you know 'em better than I do. I—I haven't changed my mind, I'm still _against_ it, the state you leave your vic—"

The word is halfway through his teeth before she is seeing violet in her head, with drips of green and bright lights and the sheer blank white between severed memories—and the shrapnel is in her eyes again, bits of ocean, sand, and fire pinning them wide open. Conner sees this only from the outside but still bites down on the word and breaks it in two, shoves the other piece under his tongue.

"—_The enemy_ in… But like I said, you could've ended that fight a lot sooner, but you didn't. 'Cause you didn't go that route. You tried hitting him telekinetically and when you finally did use telepathy it wasn't… it was a better way. I saw you trying and… I get that. I get what that's like. 'Cept there _I _was trying to get you to… I don't even know."

He pauses to rub the back of his neck. It's a furnace now, giving off heat with depletion. Both of his palms sweat. "I don't know _what_ to tell you anymore—but—but somebody else might. What I'm trying to say is… I think it's time the Team finds out exactly how you've been getting your intel. And I… I'm hoping you think so, too. We need to know who and what we're fighting _with_ as much as what we're fighting _against_." He nods at himself, satisfied with the statement. "It's time to stop with the secrets."

Some part of her is still breathing without her telling it to, she's sure of it, but it can't be her mouth because her mouth won't listen, won't move. Her chest heaves with more proof that she's functioning, she's functioning, but it's not a comfort. Her eyes dart to the sheen on the tabletop, a shadow of a leaf, a bead of water clinging to the watering can's spout; anything that's nothing of consequence. Her hands wring into her skin hard enough to make her right wrist audibly pop.

Conner shifts in his seat, thrums one set of fingers three times against his bicep, and straightens again. He almost asks if she even heard him, if by some fluke he only spoke loudly enough for his own ears or if the nerves in his throat fooled him into thinking he was voicing his thoughts at all. He'll see himself out if that's the case, wrestle with words some more and try again tomorrow. "M'gann?"

Her head jerks up. "Hm?"

"That… that was it. That's all I had to say."

"Oh." It sinks back down. She inhales sharply through her nose (_that's it_, she realizes, _that's right, she can do that_) and asks, "None of the usual?"

Conner sighs like an engine sputters, voice running on fumes at the back of his throat. There's pressure in his neck where the heat has died down; he stuffs his hands back into his pockets and lets it throb. "Does it ever do any good?"

"No." She pushes herself up from the chair by hand. "I never let it."

"Wh—M'gann. M'gann!" She lets his voice roll cleanly off her back as she carries the watering can back to the sink, footsteps hitting in time with repetitions of her name that all stop as the water starts. It comes out hissing and seething, striking the bottom of the can with neatly contained echoes. The onset of quiet as it fills is halted by another sigh, backed this time by the crackle of the chair and the thud of Conner's boot.

_He doesn't know._

The water finds a loose thread in her memory and pulls it taut, dragging into the forefront of her mind the sound of Kaldur's blade warping around Artemis's torso, catching and carrying out the sound of Kaldur's fist connecting with Dick's stomach, tangling with the sound of Mount Justice's explosion reaching Kaldur's ears—and none of it belongs in her mind because it is _all Kaldur's._ And she tore through it—_him_—without a second thought.

She grips the edge of the counter. The can starts to overflow. She can feel the spray on the backs of her hands, hitting her skin in pinpricks.

The devastation on Kaldur's face, the disappointment on Artemis's; the pride in Gar's voice, La'gaan's arms around her—those _are_ hers, all hers. And her stomach crumples. She feels acid shoot to the very top of her throat and presses her hand over her mouth to force it back down. It burns her eyes and lungs and every other part of her, and she wants nothing more to become shapeless, thoughtless—she wants to dissolve into the floor as something that can't cry, can't hurt, can't affect anything. Her hands shut off the water for her, and she watches like they're on a screen. Her legs shake with wishes to give out underneath her, but she makes them work instead, turning herself around to face Conner.

"That was all… nice… Conner, but it's…" _Too late. Wrong. Undeserved. Too good for her_. She catches herself panting, and it only makes her sicker to see how her shame is etching concern onto Conner's face when she's not the broken one, or either of the ones in danger. She leans into the counter for support and crosses both her arms and ankles. "We're taking turns, right? My turn now."

Conner sets a curve into his spine as he leans forward while forcing the arch of his brow. Making sure his attention shows without it coming off as too urgent, too scrutinizing, is a juggling act, a reminder that he wasn't built to emote. Frustration pulls at his neck, flashing tendons.

"Conner…" She smoothes her forehead very intently and pushes her cheeks and the muscles of her jaw into all the right positions, all indicators of stress into all the right hiding places. For her face to feel so much like a lie is rare, but it prepares her to give the truth. "Artemis is alive."

"_What?_" Conner's on his feet in an instant. The back of his chair strikes the edge of the table with a loud clack. M'gann doesn't flinch. "That's not…" Conner breathes deep and unfurls his fingers. "…Funny. April Fools' Day is over."

"I'm not joking."

"_We were there_," he says through teeth. "_Her heart stopped_. It didn't… start up again." It's been days and he can't stop listening for it, can't stop waiting to hear it again—it's as if gravity and silence merging into one oppressive force to almost bury him in the sand didn't teach him a lesson the first time. And in his head now, motors rev instead, and horns blare. People walk and talk as if it's nothing. Small threads of pain shoot up and down the cores of his back teeth as his jaw clenches, and he forces sound—the outside world's as well as his own—out of his skull. "We _watched_ Dick try to revive her and fail. Don't tell me you already forgot."

"I—" _Can't._ "—Haven't. But…" She draws her mouth into a flat line, and to his eye it thins her lips. "There's more to than what we saw. They _faked_ her death, Conner. Dick, K-Kaldur, _and _Artemis. The wound—her heart stopping—everything."

She watches his eyes go wide and sees something of the bow whose blood used to boil when confusion overwhelmed him, but when the tension recedes from his face, she's reminded that time's preservation of the features she's traced a thousand times over in her mind has not guaranteed the same treatment for their owner.

"…And Wally?"

"…He knows, too."

Conner nods faintly at that, eyes still wide and situated in the space between his feet. The relief that comes from knowing there's been one fewer mourner among their ranks than he thought—and one that otherwise would have been one of the most affected—fits strangely in the puzzle in his head. As if it's a piece too smooth to press into jagged edges and have it fill all the tiny gaps along them, his mind can't quite touch it.

"So… she's alive." The chill from the Grotto still lingers somewhere deep in his layers of his near-impenetrable skin, and the words come out numbly despite how they shake in his mouth, in his heart. The way the truth sounds and tastes in his head, the image of blood on Artemis's uniform re-writing itself as false in his memory—it's nonsense in all his senses, and it's the best thing he's heard all week. He crosses his arms and steels himself against an oncoming smile, remembers to feel the floor through his boots in case the pure, raw joy surging through him pushes his feet off the ground. "And Kaldur… Kaldur's in on this… how?"

"He's on our side," M'gann says woefully, losing her breath in one instant and recovering in another. The guilt moves her naturally, makes itself as much a part of her as either lung. She pushes the thickest parts of her palms into the counter and fights the urge to cling. "Kaldur turning against us was all part of a _mission _to gain intel on the Light's new partner. The destruction of the Cave, Artemis's… murder… were all so Kaldur could convince the Light of his loyalty. Artemis isn't dead, she's _with him_ undercover."

Thoughts swim visibly behind the twitches in Conner's brow, but M'gann blinds her mind to them, presses her own thoughts into the back walls of her psyche, and despite the strength of their push and pull blocks the waves flowing off of him from her field of recognition. When Conner meets her eye again, it's with an uneasiness that she can't name.

His head ticks to the side. "T…Tigress?"

"_How_ did you—"

"She's new. Zero intel on her in the League's database. Artemis is Tigress." He pauses to assess the sound of it to his ears, and it sounds just as crazy as the truth about her death, which in actuality tells him nothing. "Right?"

M'gann feels a trembling at the hinges of her jaw as she nods rigidly, and the feeling sinks down into her shoulders as Conner unfolds his arms and steps forward. "Oh, man, and I threw her into the ceiling." He scratches at his empty palms, head hanging low and eyes darting off to the right as he walks. "Don't wanna think about what I could have done to Kaldur if I'd had the chance."

She pictures it instead: the broken bones, the shattered armor, the limp body on the floor of the Reach's ship splayed out on its back instead of fallen to its knees. Her mind spins back years ago to the assassin in Dhabar, to sensing the embers of Conner's burning rage still clinging to the flesh pummeled into the concrete—but she knows that that fire is no longer inside of him. It's in her now, and for Kaldur's sake she'd switch hers and Conner's positions in a heartbeat, trade all the ruptures in the very fabric of Kaldur's mind for wound from which he'd have a chance at healing, wrought by hands that, if only in the most vital of moments, would have held back. But thoughts like that are useless now, and take root only in the shallows of her mind, because the guilt is deeper. It's some inherent, immutable part of her now, and no stretch of her imagination could transplant it to another's conscience. No suspension of her own conscience would keep her from killing the feeling while it's still inside her before ever letting another bear its weight.

Conner stops close enough for her to smell the sweat dried in his clothes from the fight at the Hall, to see the small dark hairs left plastered to his temples. Her hands leave their support to hang dutifully from stiff arms at her sides. The sight of the acute twinge in her brow is enough to pull at all of her skin at once, and she's suddenly aware of her every vertebra as the tension in her neck leaks into the muscles of her back. And already, before his lips can even part, M'gann hears all his breath gather into a growl, and the air between her and him runs thin.

"Dick's our leader, why's he been keeping all this from us?! And why's he only saying this now—and not to the whole team?!" Wind hits M'gann's cheek as he flings an arm out to his right. "Here _we_ are, thinking we've got next-to_-no_ leads for _months_ on the Light's partner, when in _reality_, we've got one, two people on the inside? Why keep us in the dark?!" His voice leaps over and over in his throat and last seconds in the atmosphere each time before plunging into his gut. He runs a hand through his hair and clumps as many of the short locks as he can in his fist, then in letting go lets his arm drop to his side. "And the _abductions_? The _Cave_?!" He feels himself reaching, fumbling for a grip on his own anger—but as he has learned to keep control he's built so many traps and catches inside himself that they strangle the feeling, complicate it. With ease he can displace her in his sight and picture his fists breaking through the metal basin of the sink, or the cabinet doors, or the floor, or _anything_, but his hands amount to little more than rocks at the ends of his wrists now, his fingers clenched tightly enough to immobilize and numb them.

M'gann's eyes follow every motion of his hands, every twitch and curl of lips on a face flaring red at its center. "It's stupid!" Conner says as he slams his fists onto nothing, just kicks up more air at his sides. A dam breaks somewhere around her heart that lets her pulse flood the channels in her head again, and she starts a numberless countdown in her mind to an end she can't define. When his eyes find their way back to her and his shoulders square with hers, it accelerates. Her skin swells with ridges all along her arms and neck. He grits his teeth and flares his nostrils, and she is poised to burst. "And why isn't he telling me this _himself_ instead of making you—"

"Conner, you _don't understand!_" M'gann shrieks, and Conner catches the stiffness she sheds as the power of her voice sends her lurching towards him. She rocks back onto her heels and seethes. "No one's told me any of this. I found out _my way_."

"You—" His chest empties completely, evicts breath and heart and all as told by the abrupt silences inside him. "You found—"

"I got all of this from Kaldur's mind." The truth settles in her bones for the umpteenth time as heavily as the moment it had come to be, but she keeps her head craned against its gravity. But she can see his jaw slacken, hear his breathing hitch before his lungs can find their rhythm again; she can feel the whites of his eyes embed themselves in her skin as they crowd out his irises. "What?" she asks with bruises in her voice. "Don't tell me you're surprised?"

"I _wish_ I was surprised!" Conner roars. He has not wanted to but he has, for days, thought of grabbing Kaldur by the throat and screaming his own throat raw; of throwing Kaldur to the ground and wringing out the answers to every why that has pounded in his chest at the very thought of Kaldur. He has been prepared to break skin and spill blood to understand how Kaldur could have told him all those years ago that regardless of his origins, just being alive made his life his choice. He has been ready to break a bone to make Kaldur admit to that lie. But what he would have had to do to himself, the parts of himself that he would have had to suffocate in order to _hurt_ one of his oldest, closest friends—that is the one thing he's thought Kaldur could tell him that he has not wanted to understand, but a few simple words from her has undone this all. "Or… maybe…" He sighs. "I wish I _wasn't. _What Gar saw on the Reach's ship—what you let Gar _brag_ on you about?! Really?! I thought you were better than that, M'gann! I thought—"

"Well, you were wrong, Conner!" Her head and neck tremble from how tightly her teeth clench around his name. "And all _that_ you just said, about _understanding_ why I've been using my powers like this—you were wrong thinking I deserved any of _that_, too!"

"I—just—" He goes from jumping in his skin to somersaulting, turning circles in his head. "What happened to gathering intel for the sake of the entire planet, huh? What happened to _that_ excuse? I know, this _thing_ is what you do now—you've got all this power in your head and I know _they_ don't mean anything to you, but why attack Kaldur?! We _had_ all the captives by then, what could you have _possibly been looking for_?!"

"I don't _have_ an excuse!" M'gann throws out her arms, her palms upturned and pleading, and reverberations from her snapped joints send a fleeting numbness through her fingers. "I wasn't looking for anything!" She draws a long breath in through her teeth, feeds and keeps down the heart incessantly repeating its threat to leap out of her chest, and her arms fall limp at her sides. Her gaze falls from Conner's blanched face to the floor. "This was worse than what you've seen me do. The moment I saw Kaldur, I just _attacked_. And he resisted, but I—but I didn't care. I had the mind of a _murderer_ in my hands and I unleashed everything—all my anger, all the betrayal—_everything_ I had on him until his mind _succumbed_."

"_M'gann—_" He chokes on her name, chokes on the conviction in her tone, but still manages to get his hands around her arms; to catch them, as if they are trying to evade him. He doesn't see that once he has a hold of them, he is the only thing making them move. "_Listen to yourself_!"

"You think I'm not?" What gets its hooks into the corners of M'gann's mouth isn't a smile—it can't be. Conner refuses to believe in the very sight of that lateral stretch of her lips over teeth. But disbelief only puts haste in his hands as he pries them off, and as M'gann drags her gaze up from his feet and past the symbol on his chest, his head is not the one that starts to shake. "You honestly think I'm _defending_ myself?" she asks, and a sharp intake of air plucks at elastic inside her, starts her throat and her shoulders on a quivering fit that spreads across her chest and reaches down to the bottom of her ribs. Conner doesn't see the first tear form, or the second; just has time to vaguely notice that suddenly there's too much light in her eyes before that light is running lines down past the receding edges of her mouth. "Kaldur was innocent, and everything he's done has been to help our team save our world." Her voice burns and shivers in her throat, and she snarls at both sensations, snarls at herself. "And I broke him for it. If you think I'd try to justify that then _you don't know me at all_."

Conner's feet fall two steps back. Thinking doesn't get him there. He doesn't think. His mind for one moment is emptier than it was the day he shot like a bullet out of his Cadmus pod. It's emptier than it's ever been. Only once his heels are planted firmly into the floor and the swaying sensation leaves his knees does his mouth recall the shape of her name, but his voice is nowhere, not in a single cell of his throat.

M'gann squints like he's jumped miles away in a single bound. She blinks to beat back a flood, but her lashes only expedite the fall of one more tear, then another, then another down her face. She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand and tucks stray hair behind her ear to mask the intent. "W-what was that?" She breathes heavily, feels a weight in her lower lip and wind on her teeth unlike any act of gravity she's ever willed her body against. Her mouth can't seem to close. "You're scared? Right? Y-you need to be! I'm _terrifying_!" Her shoulders slump and her stomach clenches around the word. Her heart finally takes its leap. "Five years ago I almost killed all of my friends because I lost control of my powers. _This time_, I lost control of _myself_, and I don't—I don't know if Kaldur will ever wake up. Now he's… now Artemis is… I doomed them _both, _I ruined everything! Everything! I can't be trusted with my _own mind_, Conner! _I can't be trusted with my own mind_!"

Conner watches as the pointed finger M'gann has beaten into her own chest fells her like a blade. He watches that same hand wring the neckline of her shirt, watches it reach out with the other to seek purchase as gravity smashes her knees into the hardwood floor. He watches her body fold in half, and he watches her cry—he hears her gasp every new breath and shudder out every old—and just stands. His hands just itch, just ache to the bone. His eyes just stare.

"It's not… all that, M'gann…" His voice thuds softly against the walls of a hollow head as he pulls words out from nowhere, hardly feels himself speaking. His boots connect and disconnect in dialogue with the floor but he walks numbly, carries himself over to her. He doesn't think to help her up—instead he sets himself down onto one knee before her and props an arm up on the other. Doing so hardly puts him on her level when his eyes can still pick out subtle bumps in her spine through her sweater and still trace the line in her scalp from which her hair falls inches from the floor, blocking her eyes from his sight.

She's not as close as she looks anymore. Every now and then, he forgets that. He's enough aware of it at the back of his head for their knees to stand no chance of brushing against each other, for him to have put himself there. "Just… Just whatever you did to Kaldur. Fixing that. That's our main concern now."

"N-no, it's… it's a pattern." As he straightens her back, a tear falls from her face and plants one more wet spot in the hair-thin layer of dust below her. She keeps her eyes on the cluster, traces imperfect circles and the spaces between them as her breathing fails to settle. Her nails scratch denim as she knots her fingers against the surfaces of her thighs. "This is me. This is what I do. Like you said—"

"I didn't—"

"You know it," M'gann wrings out from twisting lips, rising shoulders. "You know it's true." She sinks a little lower, shifts her weight off of toes and ankles that throb faintly at the edges of her recognition, beyond her real concern.

Conner drops his other knee to the floor and sighs. A nameless thing in his chest roars to be pushed closer to her, and another in his head roars to be let out. What they make combined inside of him is monstrous: a voice that, despite all his talk of extremes and limits, commands him to hold her tight and scream. His hands stay fists in his lap. "I don't know anything."

"No-oh. You know _all of it._"

His shoulders sigh for him. "M'gann…"

"You're the only one that does. I should've—that should've—I should've—"

"M'gann!"

M'gann reaches out for some part of him to tug or touch, but when his hand is all that hers can find, she opts for her own instead. "Tell Nightwing,' she says with a voice that breaks to make itself heard. Her fingers squeeze and twist at each other hard enough to split knuckles like hairs.

He's never seen anything render her so childlike. Even on the nights he awoke to her nightmares and woke her from them, even on the darkest nights she's ever let him hold her—_wanted_ him to hold her, felt whatever mix of strong and weak enough it took to make her ask—he's stayed aware of her years. He's known, even when she'd open up her mind and memories for him, that some parts of her would always be passed through filters of time that in him are still fragile and incomplete, hardly functional. But a raw sadness sits plainly on the surfaces of her voice and hands and everything, down to her sniffling nose and protruding lower lip. Down to the "_mm_-mm" that escapes her when _he _tries for _her wrist_ instead (_not her hand, not anymore, he __**knows**__ that, but—_). Down to the smallness that takes her over, the weight of an ocean manifested in thin air.

"_Tell him_. Tell the League. A-a-about everything. You _have _ to now, I'm a proven threat." Light falls flat on her cheeks, clings to dried tears. "I don't," she whispers, before flexing her throat visibly to work strength back into her voice. "I don't even deserve t-to… t-t-to even _be_ on Earth, after all I've—"

"M'gann, no, this isn't better!" He can't see a tide, but he feels the force of a flood at his knees, feels it push her further away. His hands wind around her arms again, pulling _himself_ closer to her. "What would _punishing_ you right now solve? Nothing! It's not even your…"

His hand slip down and stop on the natural bends in her arms. _It's not even your fault_. That's not true. He can't say that. Not that that's ever stopped any of them.

She's not there to hear the thought, but in her own head, she can guess. There's danger in his sympathy, and fear in her to match. "Conner, _don't_," she chokes out, warns, begs.

"…Fine. But we _need you_ to fix Kaldur's mind." Conner tightens his grip. The pulse pounding between his fingers is either in her veins or his own, and it takes a breath to make him remember why the difference matters. "Got that? _We need you_." He levels his eyes with hers, and she mirrors the upward push he gives his head. Shadows shift along her neck; he sees her swallow hard. "We all. Need you. We need to get Kaldur to you ASAP so you can—"

"What? No!" Her chest clenches, and she can taste the air bitterly through her teeth. "You can't let me _near_ another mind, and not _Kal_—"

"That's not an option. Kaldur and Artemis are—" He feels a spike. Something whirs and boils in his gut. Heat leaks into his temples. "—_Were_ in enough danger before, putting themselves _right_ in enemy hands, and _now_—"

"I can't!" She throws her voice down to the floor, and so it sits with them, right between them; echoes stack themselves into a wall. Conner lets go of her without a thought, and her hands take the place of his, nurse the patches of warmth he's pressed into her biceps as if they're wounds, hold in the blood. "I don't know how," she says lowly, reclaiming calmness. "A-a-and if I try, y-you know I'll just—I'll hurt him more, because I don't know _how_ to fix a broken mind. I don't. I never…" _Wanted to. _A chill washes over her skin, turns it fresh and cold.

"…That's not true." He states it as fact, right in the thick of a gulp. "That's not true and you know it. What about when you saved _my_ mind in Bialya? _Years_ ago. And you've only gotten stronger. _Don't_ try to tell me you're not."

"…_No_. You don't understand. It's _different._ Psimon p-put up a wall. I… I _broke_ Kaldur's walls. I shattered him, h-his mind." She stares into the floor as if it's turned to glass, eyes wide like it's threatening to collapse. "He's-s safer away fr-from-m-me. So's Artemi-mis. So's everyone."

"_Stop_. That's not—" _That's not true._ The hitch comes again, in his breath and in his head, like he's under some curse that keeps the slightest lie from passing through him. The evil in it is that it's only come now. Otherwise he could have caught this all at _He went to tell Wally_, right at _I can't hear her heartbeat_, right at _How could you betray us?! _Knowing when something's real and knowing when he's being duped—there's no special vision for that, no heightened sense, no thicker skin. There is only trust. There _was_ only trust. In the tiniest corner of his mind, the darkest and most sequestered, he repeats himself. _Stop._ He wants to call on her to stop this, all of this—untwist reality and raise a mountain up from rubble because _he can't_.

The sound of her breath drags him out of his thoughts on tracks of sandpaper, and his insides flex back into steel. "Ev..r'one…" she mumbles into her palm, teeth half-biting at her own skin, as her body starts to curl. Her eyes screw shut. "So're you."

"M'gann…" His hand misses her. His eyes can't focus; he doesn't even graze her. She tucks in her head far enough to push the bottom of her chin against her collarbone, and he merely blinks. She holds tight to her elbows through the hard and fast rise and fall of a few sobs. It's _everything_ that pops and gurgles under her surface now, that forces tears along on their slow crawl up her throat. It's everything from the day she first learned that she was _dangerous_, something different from _useless_ that she had tried to take hold of and twist into _useful_. It's everything since. It's every part of her that she could never change with her shape, and spots of white filter in through the back of her mind, of cold and loss and pain. Her hands dig into her hair. One sob turns into a dry cough as air catches on the knot in her throat. The next is a distinct crack. The next is full of tears. On some level Conner knows that looking away won't block out the sound, but he has to try. His gaze crash-lands somewhere near her feet, and he watches her toes clench in her sandals. He sighs another of the thousand sighs that are filling up his lungs, clamping around his heart.

The Team can't lose Kaldur or Artemis again. They can't lose them for real. If he calls Nightwing now, Conner knows the phone will shatter in his hand before it can connect. He can feel the shards already, a light prickling in his palms, and at the same time his hands feel weak. He doesn't pick up a phone. He doesn't lift a finger. He barely gets ahold of his next breath through the sound of her crying, of her voice leaking out and choking on itself before it can reach substantial height. She shakes, heaves against the bars of her arms to the rhythm of her heart, and his body feels hollowed out from muscle down to marrow. But he still has his eyes. He can't look away.

It comes on simply. It suspends itself in his vision like a trick of the light, easily brushed aside and out of reason with a blink, swept under his lids like dust. It goes just like knuckles paled by the distribution of blood under her skin, just arms standing tall and lengthy against her compact form. He hears her cough, and air whistles through the teeth glinting in the shadows cast by her on her own face; that is all. She gives no real hint or warning, no deep steadying breath to ready either of them, him or herself. Something twists in her hair, and she doesn't seem to feel it. The blade of one elbow starts to push at her skin from the inside, produce itself from her sleeve like a dagger. The violet threads stretch and separate. Conner's eyes widen with the gaps.

_She's turning white._

There's not a shred of fear in him towards any form of hers—it's not her face, hands, or skin that he ever stopped recognizing—but alarm still courses down his veins, bundles its threads in with his nerves. "M'gann, what are y—"

A sharp whine cuts him off. M'gann locks thin white arms at the bulges of their wrists and holds her head between them, four long fingers reaching past her neck. "M'gann," Conner tries again. "What are you doing. What's going on."

Her sleeves shrink away from her forearms, baring more white. He thinks of ice. "_Tell me_." He thinks of ice. He thinks of ice and sweat and dye thick in his hair, the musk of busted pipes and drywall in his nostrils. He thinks of a pain worse than blindness in his eyes, of his feet being pulled in no other direction but towards her and still being lost.

Even through her sweater, she's freezing to the touch. He presses his hands into her shoulders and shakes them in slow, broad, careful sweeps against her tiny shivers. He _tries_. He tries to recognize where he stands and _stay there_, to keep her out of his arms. An ache grows into his chest, spreads to his fingers. A voice in his head warns him that he'll shatter her, and an echo of his own thoughts tells him he's too late. He drowns it all out.

"M'gann, answer me. Snap out of it."

An undercurrent of anxious, dissonant murmurs runs through her lips; she hiccups, but no words.

"_Snap out of it._ Look at me. Do some…" His mouth locks in one corner and twitches at the other. He grunts and shakes his head. "Don't…"

_Don't leave me._

She shouldn't be thinking of ice. She shouldn't be thinking of ice or sweat or dye thick in his hair, the musk of busted pipes or drywall in his nostrils. Her mind is flexed into a knot so tight that it aches to hold it, to keep every finger of her thoughts digging into the next and pierced back into herself—_no one else, never anyone else, never again_—but the needles around his heart still find hers. She doesn't seek them out, doesn't pluck a single one. But the memory permeating the outer edges of his mind she can place by the very date, the very coordinates in the Bio-Ship's log. She stakes no claim on his vision but can see the imprints behind his eyes just as clearly as he can. She can see herself. It _hurts_. It hurts and it's not her pain, not her anguish, not her fear—but they catch up quickly, run in tandem to his.

Somewhere close, stone crumbles. She can feel grains pouring down, rushing out under the pressure of the dents in her brow, and insect-like lights buzz overhead. _Not again. _She shakes her head against her arms. Friction turns her hair into fire on her skin. _She couldn't be. She can't be. _

Together she and he feel the first push of her mind against the ice—the first break—

"_**No!**_"

She pushes with hands. All four of her fingers unfurl, strike his chest. Conner releases her shoulders, but a breath barely makes its way into her mouth before the brush of his hands against her again makes her lose it. He grasps her wrists and she growls, swings her arms to shake him off. "_No!_ You _have_ to get away from me, I'll hurt you! _I'll hurt you_!"

"Look."

His fingers don't relent. Fatigue runs itself up and down her veins, fills her with weakness. Creases soften in her brow and around her eyes. She lifts her head, and for a moment, she and Conner both hold their breath. Hers rolls out wet and hissing over a swollen tongue, between sharpened teeth. His passes in silence. Her eyes give up the darkness in a single push.

There's more light than what she's braced for. The white stings. With little to no effort, no conscious command, she moves the claw he's holding and understands that _it's her_. Just like the skin pulled taut over her cheeks and the lips that won't, can't touch, _it's all her_. _It's all wrong._ From there, it should be easy, putting herself back together—and the veins running crooked lines down her face do sink back into her flesh without a thought. Her four fingers shrink and separate effortlessly into ten, and soft pink tissue gently lines the border of her open mouth to cover bruise-colored gums. But the shifting planes of her face spill collected tears, and the white clings to her skin. Her body trembles all over, in and outside of his grip.

His hand drops. His fingers clench around a fistful of air, and she rises to her feet, the skin along her wrist fades back into solid form, shimmers out of the light. One knee buckles under her as both of his leave the floor, but he blinks and she's steady, already turning away from him and back towards the sink.

"Y… you're welcome to leave." The drain gulps down water as she tilts the watering can to one side. The shaking in her hands is loud and clear. "I'm done… talking for the night."

"_Right_. Like I can just leave without you now."

She lets out too much. The faucet starts up again at a low, careful trickle.

"You found your way here just fine."

"That's not—" He forms fists in his pockets, crumples cloth lining in his hands like paper; leaves little strength for his voice, and his words fall out on a breath. "You know that's not—"

"I know." She twists the knob as far _off_ as it will go, feels it creak under her palm. Her hands rest on the watering can's handle, and nothing leaves the sink.

They wait. Even after his gloved hands shut the door behind him, and she sweeps his footprints out of the floor with the rest of the dust—even after all traces of him being there, of him knowing, are out of sight, they wait. He leaves cracks one more second's worth of weight and pressure away from being craters in the concrete on his way down the streets, and she almost raises the line of her human skin to her scalp. His thoughts race too quickly to let him break anything, let him affect anything. The line snags at her throat. They wait.


End file.
